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I see [The Lake district] as one of the most depressing landscapes in Europe. It competes with the chemical deserts of East Anglia for the title of Britain's worst-kept countryside. The celebrated fells have been thoroughly sheepwrecked:

Re: Monbiot on Newsnight

That one sheep per hectare must have one hell of an appetite to do the damage it does! On the northern fells around Caldbeck the sheep numbers have been cut drastically and it's nothing but an overgrown mess. I never bothered to look at the 700 odd comments but I would hope most of them have more sense than he does.

Re: Monbiot on Newsnight

Originally Posted by Raider112

That one sheep per hectare must have one hell of an appetite to do the damage it does! On the northern fells around Caldbeck the sheep numbers have been cut drastically and it's nothing but an overgrown mess. I never bothered to look at the 700 odd comments but I would hope most of them have more sense than he does.

Re: Monbiot on Newsnight

I guess that's the point. Nature would reclaim it as forest. What farmers hate the most is the bit in between. The bit with the brambles and pioneer tree species that they see as an untidy mess. I've got a bit of that. How I have to fight the urge to flatten it all and make it look all square and nice. Don't know the guy and don't know what he's on about but I do know that what most farmers I know abhor is the mess that nature makes when it takes over and starts the reversion to woodland. I'll have to look at that bramble patch the rest of my natural probably and think what I could graze, hatch or plant on there. Maybe my grandchildren will walk through a woodland someday.

Re: Monbiot on Newsnight

Don't get me started - I had a letter form the Welsh Ass Government yesterday: apparently we (everyone in Wales) have to ask permission before we harrow on anything other than improved grassland. We have to submit an Environmental Impact Assessment Scoping Report if we want to do anything on anything other than improved grassland or arable - Seems they want the whole country to be covered in scrub (need permission to cut that as well)!.

Re: Monbiot on Newsnight

Looking at the details of his book, this is a softener for that, clearly. But there is something hugely arrogant about someone who sees food production as an irrelevance; apparently wants the country transformed into one huge wildlife / adventure park where he can go kayaking, etc., yet still wants to eat... Presumably he wants to push food production onto other countries, where, if it is a bad thing, it will reduce other places to desert. But that's OK, is it?

The big problem with people like this is that they talk so passionately and persuasively whilst missing out the awkward bits, like; where is food actually to come from; or how wealthy would Welsh sheep farms be if there were no subsidy, but they were paid at true market value for their produce; or even, do we actually want to live and bring up our families in a small intensely populated country occupied by wolves?

I would suspect the problems with landslides is more to do with the design of the road and its cuttings than with sheep. Maybe we should just do away with the road and let it revert to nature...

I would want to look at his figures very carefully, too. The way in which he has missed out relevant parts of the subsidy system and who or what it ACTUALLY subsidises (I mean, you could equally well make an argument to say that the farms are actually paid in no small measure for conservation, meaning that payments would have to increase if there were fewer sheep and more conservation) suggests that you cannot take the figures he quotes at face value.

Some of the worst damage to upland that I have seen has been a result of treeplanting disrupting drainage on the lower slopes and turning the hilltop into a bog as it backfilled, over the course of years, with water, so trees can cause as many problems as they solve; it isn't as simple as he suggests.

Re: Monbiot on Newsnight

This is what happens when "Re-wilding" takes place. Wolves were re-introduced in the Alps and the Haute-Pyrenees. The ecologists/apologists are apparently "surprised" the fluffy little wolfies are not staying where they were released.
Taken from "Pleinchamp"

The prefects of Aube and Haute-Marne will allow the slaughter of stray dogs (maybe wolves) after repeated attacks of sheep flocks in border operations in two departments.

"From Wednesday and for one month, game wardens and lieutenants louveterie have the opportunity to shoot the dogs wandering state during night patrols around the sheep farms in four districts of the two departments," it was said to the prefecture of the Haute-Marne.
Aube and Haute-Marne experienced since the end of May 2013 more than two dozen attacks herds causing death by slaughter or euthanasia due to serious injury, fifty sheep.
Many of these attacks were classified "not excluded Wolf" by specialists of the National Office for Hunting and Wildlife which however, could not confirm this hypothesis, the absence of DNA traces found on site. Three wolves have been identified since April 2011 in the Vosges forest distant a hundred kilometers from where attacks in Champagne.
In the Vosges, wolves killed 139 sheep in 72 predations in 2011 and 80 in 40 attacks the following year."These large-scale operations are also intended to provide new information on the type of canine responsible for these attacks, " sources said the prefecture.
In June already patrols responsible for identifying or frightening predators had circulated in vain for ten days around sheep farms in Haute-Marne.
According to the law, a dog is considered in a state of wandering if it is, outside a hunting action or custody or protection of a herd or flock, not under the effective supervision of its master, a distance exceeding one hundred meters.

Re: Monbiot on Newsnight

Originally Posted by swedehurler

The same Monbiot who advises people not to buy from farm shops, only from supermarkets as they are more hygenic.

And on Friday it was all over the front page of our local paper that the "technical problems" that have closed the bakery and delicatessen of the Tesco branch in town (but not, surprisingly, the rest of the shop which must use the same storage areas and loading bays?) are the brown whiskery Norwegian sort...